Things near & far

About the book

Machen begins with the remembered roads and river around Caerleon, allowing family scenes and imagined reconstructions to mingle with the knowledge that their people are gone. London then becomes another landscape of discovery, where poorly paid literary tasks and long solitary walks coexist with intense enthusiasm for books. Work on a catalogue of occult literature prompts reflections that combine skepticism with reluctance to declare the universe fully understood. The difficulty of finding something to write, and the stubborn desire to write nonetheless, supply a recurring source of self-questioning. This memoir proceeds through associations rather than a rigid record of milestones. Its ordinary details acquire the same atmosphere of possibility that informs Machen's fiction, making recollection itself an exercise in attention and wonder.

• Memory and place
• Literary apprenticeship
• Wonder and uncertainty

Why read it

The memoir reveals how streets, family memories, and obscure reading could become material for an imaginative sensibility.

English text of the 1923 Martin Secker edition